The present embodiments relate to medical diagnosis, treatment planning, and/or prognosis for tumors.
Imaging is an important diagnostic tool for the prediction and monitoring of the treatment response of cancer. Current approaches generally rely on aggregate characteristics of the tumor derived from medical images. The characteristics may include tumor size (e.g., measured as linear dimensions or volume) or intensity parameters (e.g. perfusion properties). These approaches do not account for the rich information available from the spatial distribution of tumor substrate and physiology, often captured by the texture and multi-parametric spatial patterns of anatomical, physiological, and molecular images. This is the case for response prediction from single image time point or from changes in images as a function of time.